Illustration by Maya Edelman
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What is Citizen Science?
Citizen Science or Community Science is a movement where everyone can help contribute data and observations to scientific research. People can participate in numerous research projects on nearly any topic from their homes, neighborhoods, computers and phones. Your efforts can make a real impact with environmental research, earthquake early warning, astronomy, and even important research on the structure COVID-19.
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Find out more about Citizen Science projects taking place locally and around the world organized by researchers in the in the Spring 2019 issue of UC Berkeley's Rausser College of Natural Resources' magazine
Breakthroughs.
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What Counts
Mary Ellen Hannibal
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Featured in the
Breakthrough issue, Mary Ellen Hannibal discusses the benefits of citizen science for both science education and scientific discovery.
"Citizen science is often presented as primarily an educational tool, and the practice does align perfectly with STEM guidelines. But citizen science does more than educate. It makes nature observation possible on temporal and spatial scales that would otherwise be inaccessible, and it can even help reveal ecological interactions. It connects the local to the regional and the global."
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The Crowd and the Cloud is a documentary series showcasing the power of Citizen Science in the Digital Age. This four-part series takes viewers on a global tour of the projects and people on the front lines of citizen science and crowdsourcing.
Smartphones, computers and mobile technology are enabling regular citizens to become part of a 21st century way of doing science. By observing their environments, monitoring neighborhoods, collecting information about the world and the things they care about, so-called “citizen scientists” are helping professional scientists to advance knowledge while speeding up new discoveries and innovations.
The results are improving health and welfare, assisting in wildlife conservation, and giving communities the power to create needed change and help themselves.
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West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project
Making an appearance in the 3rd episode of The Crowd in the Cloud is the
West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP), which
came together as an education exercise to learn the power of Community Based Participatory Research starting in 2002. This effort was supported by the Pacific Institute, with assistance from staff and graduate students of
UC Berkeley’s
Institute of Urban and Regional Development (IURD)
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The project team included members from Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, and the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP), pictured here, as well as contributors from Environmental Defense Fund, Bay Area Air Quality Management District, and the Port of Oakland. (Credit: Chelsea Preble/Berkeley Lab)
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UC Berkeley science needs you!
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David Anderson talks BOINC, Citizen Science, and why we still need you
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David Anderson is co-creator of SETI@home,
a researcher at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory,
and the Director of BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. David is a computer scientist by trade, and mathematician by training, who's had a decades long interest in distributed computing and volunteer science.
SETI@home
is in hibernation
and is no longer distributing tasks. The SETI@home message boards will continue to operate, and the team will continue working on the back-end data analysis.
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BOINC
is the preeminent platform for volunteer computing (VC). It is used by most VC projects, including SETI@home, Einstein@home, Climateprediction.net, IBM World Community Grid, and Rosetta@home.
Science United
is a new way to participate in BOINC. With Science United, computer owners volunteer for science areas rather than for specific projects. Science United assigns computers to appropriate projects; these assignments may change over time.
With the recent COVID-19 outbreak,
Rosetta@home
has been used to predict the structure of proteins important to the disease as well as to produce new, stable mini-proteins to be used as potential therapeutics and diagnostics, like the one shown here which is bound to part of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
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COVID-19 spike and binding protein
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SOD Blitzes -
Communities coming together in the fight against
Sudden Oak Death
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Sudden Oak Death (SOD), a serious exotic disease, is threatening the survival of tanoak and several oak species in California. Currently SOD is found in the wildlands of 14 coastal California counties, from Monterey to Humboldt. While patchy in distribution, with each passing year, the swath of infection continues to become more contiguous.
SOD-blitzes inform and educate the community about Sudden Oak Death, get locals involved in detecting the disease, and produce detailed local maps of disease distribution. The map can then be used to identify those areas where the infestation may be mild enough to justify proactive management.
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Interested in participating in a SOD-Blitz or catching up on the results in your area? Learn more:
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On January 15, 2006, the Stardust spacecraft’s sample return capsule parachuted gently onto the Utah desert. Nestled within the capsule were precious particles collected during Stardust’s dramatic encounter with comet Wild 2 in January of 2004; and something else, even rarer and no less precious: tiny particles of interstellar dust that originated in distant stars, light-years away. They are the first such contemporary interstellar dust particles ever collected in space and returned to Earth for study.
Before they can be studied, though, these tiny interstellar grains have to be found by examining scanning microscope images of the entire Stardust interstellar collector. The
Stardust team at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Lab
is asking for help from talented volunteers from all over the world to find more particles.
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MyShake
is a citizen science project developed at the UC Berkeley Seismology lab which brings users together to build a global earthquake early warning network. The app (for both iOS and Android) keeps you informed about earthquakes and monitors for them using data from your phone’s sensors.
The goal of MyShake is to build a worldwide earthquake early warning network so that communities can reduce the impact of earthquakes. Since MyShake uses smartphones as earthquake sensors, it can be used everywhere - even in countries without access to traditional seismic technology. MyShake collects motion data from your phone’s sensors and uses a patented neural network to determine whether that motion fits the model of an earthquake.
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For more information about upcoming lectures and other events, please visit the
Thanks for your continued interest in science! Please feel free to share this with friends. Our events are always free and open to the public.
Programs are subject to change without notice.
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